For many Jews, making aliyah is a response to a commandment, an edict from the Creator. And for some, it’s an escape from a life that has spiraled out of control. That would seem to be one of the messages of the new French film “Aliyah,” directed and co-written by Elie Wajeman. It’s a deft, smart first feature and, not surprisingly, Wajeman’s protagonist seems doomed to find that the problems he will encounter in Tel Aviv are not so different from the ones he is leaving behind in Paris.

“Re-Emerging: The Jews of Nigeria” is one of those peculiar documentary films that makes a sort of nonsense of everything I know about film and art. On the one hand the film, which is produced, written, directed, shot and edited by Jeff L. Lieberman, is a baggy, often shapeless mess, meandering and repetitive, filled with side roads that lead nowhere and a narration that borders on the amateur.

When it played last fall’s New York Film Festival, Rama Burshtein’s debut feature, “Fill the Void,” was one of the great surprises of the autumn, a stunningly poised and mature first film that heralded the first major talent to emerge from the haredi film community in Israel. Now that the film has opened theatrically in New York, it looks — if anything — even better.

At a time when too many homegrown films check their brains at the door to the theater, and the tone of political discourse in America has become unspeakably shrill, it might seem churlish to complain that a new film suffers from too much abstract discussion and a certain lack of passion.

The cover of the latest issue of Moment Magazine asks, “Is the Two-State Solution Dead?” Israeli documentarian Dan Setton approaches the same question in his new film “State 194,” opening on May 17, with a sober, somber tread befitting the slow-motion train wreck that Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations have become.